A lucky bloke who managed to score an engineering sample of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7990 sought to make a quick buck by auctioning it on Ebay. An opening bid of $0.99, and 36 bids (ATP) later, the auction has reached the $1,125 mark. The engineering sample is said to ship with clock speeds of 950 MHz core, and 6.00 GHz memory. The dual-GPU graphics cards ships with two fully-loaded AMD "Tahiti" GPUs, with 2048 stream processors each, and a 384-bit memory interface holding 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, each. If anything the Ebay listing gave us some gorgeous pictures of the beast.

I'm not aware of any beta drivers that can run this card, apart from the one meant for reviewers, and the pre-beta used in the GDC demo. So the seller of this card definitely has access to reviewer drivers, if he claims to have tested it.

I'm not aware of any beta drivers that can run this card, apart from the one meant for reviewers, and the pre-beta used in the GDC demo. So the seller of this card definitely has access to reviewer drivers, if he claims to have tested it.

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Do you really need special drivers for the card? Won't it just show up as two 7970s in crossfire?

The NDA is not up. We went over this in the other thread. I think bT published its up the 24th? I cannot confirm nor deny that. I do know that AMD CSR is a muppet.

Like Wizz said, the person selling it MAY be 3rd party and did not sign the NDA so it COULD be legal in that regard. That said, its an Engineering Sample and at least with CPU's you are not allowed to sell ES CPUs. BUT an AMD CSR has NO CLUE who the hell is selling that or who signed the NDA in the first place. So he may TECHNICALLY be correct, but it was pure luck he was and certainly not based on any facts as NOBODY knows them.

The NDA is not up. We went over this in the other thread. I think bT published its up the 24th? I cannot confirm nor deny that. I do know that AMD CSR is a muppet.

Like Wizz said, the person selling it MAY be 3rd party and did not sign the NDA so it COULD be legal in that regard. That said, its an Engineering Sample and at least with CPU's you are not allowed to sell ES CPUs. BUT an AMD CSR has NO CLUE who the hell is selling that or who signed the NDA in the first place. So he may TECHNICALLY be correct, but it was pure luck he was and certainly not based on any facts as NOBODY knows them.

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I am just passing along what AMD told me.

They went and looked at the listing while on the phone with me and came back and told me it was perfectly legal for that card to be sold.

I will take AMD's word over any third party folks claiming to know better than the company itself.

So, I took the time to call AMD myself (OMG 9AM couldnt come fast enough!), and talked to George. George stated that the card shouldnt be sold, PERIOD. He found the listing and said, "no way should that be sold" and that he would "take this link to his management so they are aware of it".

So, Im curious, now who do you trust since you have conflicting information from the same source? I still stand behind that CSR's know little of this, but the information Wizz and I brought up are facts.